Trip to the Cemeteries

Hello again, my friends! It was a busy week, so we didn't have time to write the blog post until this morning. We went away on a trip to CT. We went there to see my family.  My mom grew up in Stafford Springs, so we were visiting there.

She noticed a cemetery that she used to go to when she was a kid (about my age, I think). The cemetery was founded in 1724. It was before the Revolutionary War.  Here's a picture of the sign. (I used my own camera I got for my birthday to take all of the pictures.)

The cemetery is hidden in a forest on a back road. I've never gone to a cemetery before, so I got really nervous. I wasn't nervous after about five minutes because I knew that we were just there to look around and not touch anything. I thought I could handle it pretty well.

The cemetery was calm and peaceful.  The ground was covered in moss.  It felt kind of springy. It was a little blanket to keep everybody warm.

We couldn't read a lot of the gravestones because that cemetery is really old. The gravestones are so old that some of them had moss on them. They weren't all perfectly in one piece. Some were broken. Sometimes you would see one broken in half and the other piece was a foot away.

We found a lot of Revolutionary War veterans buried there. Here are some pictures of their graves.

 

 

My mom recognized a few of the names because some of the streets are named after them. Converse Street is named after Josiah Converse. We even found some information about him on the internet.  You can read it here.

This is his grave.  It's cracked because it was so long ago.

Another cool thing about Stafford Springs is that Lafayette and Washington stayed there during the Revolutionary War. We couldn't see the building they stayed in because it's now nothing. Mom is disappointed because it's gone now. 

On Friday, we went to the Albany Rural Cemetery, but that was when the big storm was rolling in. So we didn't have much time. We will revisit it pretty soon. We managed to find Philip Schuyler's grave,

We also found Margaret Schuyler's grave. (For Hamilton fans: that's Peggy!) Surprisingly they weren't buried anywhere close to each other. Margaret was married to a Van Rensselaer, so she was in the Van Rensselaer section.

We also found the grave of Chester Arthur, our 21st President. (He was President a long time after the Revolutionary War.) His grave was really pretty. There's an angel on it. Here's a picture.

I think it's important to remember these people who fought in the war for us. I kind of felt weird and a bit happy going to the cemeteries. It's weird to feel sad for the people you don't know in the cemetery. But you feel happy to know that they might be standing right next to you. I think that they would be happy to know that people are actually visiting them, even though they don't know us. It probably feels good to be remembered.  Let's have a moment of silence for all of them.